Web negative space in Japan
Negative space aka 余白 is a space between elements. It is often used as a means to draw attention, which helps create better user experiences in the latest web design.
For many reasons, we rarely see web services with a good usage of negative space in Japan.
Here are what I think is making the unique phenomenon.
Editorial design mindset
One of the reasons could be that many designers and decision makers bring an “editorial design” mindset into web design, in which lots of lots of information must be laid out in a single page so that they can keep and expand their profit within a certain amount of pages.
In other words, many people treat a web page like a static magazine page. You would probably get a request to put certain elements in the first view that is already full of information if you were a web designer in Japan.
Because of the web design tendency, users are used to the static web experience where they find important information with less interactions such as scrolling or clicking.
The static web experience is pretty close to a magagine spread experience.
Yahoo! Japan’s influence
Another reason I can come up with is that Yahoo! Japan’s top page. It has been influencing the Japanese web design trend since it rolled out in April 1996 as the first search engine platform in Japan. Anyone who was using the Internet at home was using it as a main information hub. This is THE web layout that many people anticipate when usring the Internet.
Their layout has not changed almost forever since their very early release in the late 90’s, which is this Header + Three columns layout.
The fact that each column has a lot of information actually works well as a web portal site like Yahoo! Japan where people do all sorts of things and threfore many businesses are involved at once behind the scene.
What’s unique is that ever since Yahoo! Japan established the web page layout standard, other types of Japanese services including EC and travel services have been following it.
It surely does look like the time has stopped in the late 90’s or the early 2000’s. However, I am pretty sure these sites are performing well even today.
Yahoo! Japan has approximately 48 million monthly active users as of 2019, which is like one third of Japan’s total population. And they say 80.9% of the total population is using the Internet as of 2017. We can easily guess how much influence Yahoo! Japan’s portal site has been making in the Japanese web industry.
Wrap up
If people are used to and prefer the static web experience with lots of information, negative space that requires dynamic interactions might be less effective in Japanese web service design for the audience.